Notepad++ Plugins 1

I’m a big advocate of Notepad 📝 ++. It’s free, and it got a great community of developers who offer great plugins that can enhance your productivity. I did inform Tim German (2 years ago, I did start and what you now see is a resurfaced draft ;)) that I’ll write a post on the plugins that I use and offer some tips. I feel now is the time o_O. Before I jump into the plugins, let’s look at some shortcuts.

Here are two links that you can explore if you are all about shortcuts.

http://techtalk.virendrachandak.com/notepad-keyboard-shortcuts/

http://www.keyxl.com/aaacd5a/43/Notepad-Plus-text-editor-software-keyboard-shortcuts.htm

Moving lines in Notepad++

Let’s say for example you want to move lines, cut and paste works all the time. However, this is an excellent shortcut to know.

Keep the cursor on the line you want to move, Use Ctrl+Shift keys and Up/Down keys to move the line.

This works for multiple lines too, and the difference is you got to select those lines.

Duplicating and Cut lines

Of course, Ctrl+X works. However, you’ve to select the line and then cut it, here is a shortcut for you – Ctrl + L, cuts the line that you are on.

To duplicate a line, Ctrl + D

Preferences

You can set preferences, and I would recommend setting at least one and that would be the backup.

Settings->Preferences->Backup.

I’ve gone back and looked up one-month-old documents that I forgot to save!!!!

You can run a search from Notepad ++ and even set up your search engine.

If you want to use Essbase techref, you can do that too.

TechRef
For any words
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E40248_01/epm.1112/essbase_tech_ref/search/srchrslt.htm?searchField=$(CURRENT_WORD)&srcriteria=any

Exact Phrase
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E40248_01/epm.1112/essbase_tech_ref/search/srchrslt.htm?searchField=$(CURRENT_WORD)&srcriteria=phrase

All Words
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E40248_01/epm.1112/essbase_tech_ref/search/srchrslt.htm?searchField=$(CURRENT_WORD)&srcriteria=all

If you would like to use the latest documentation, then it is as follows

https://docs.oracle.com/apps/search/search.jsp?q=”$(CURRENT_WORD)”&category=applications&product=e57185-01

Open Menu

I’ve seen a handful of people navigating back to the same file directory and opening another file in same location using the right-click menu. You don’t have to do it. The default directory always follows the current document. What that means is if you have got a document open in NPP, which was on your Desktop, you can directly use Ctrl + O, or File->Open, it will take to “Desktop” (current document directory).

Right Click menus

You can get full file path, file name only, and a lot of other handy shortcuts from right click menu. Go ahead and right click on the file tab.

My favorites

1. Close all to left (and right)
2. Open containing folder in explorer
3. Full File path to clipboard
4. Move to new Instance (I like to take screenshots, without clutter )

Now if I perform a right click on a line or a selection, I get this

Depending on the language selection, you can comment (Ctrl + K) and uncomment (Ctrl + Alt + K) the selection, search on the internet, change case, last but not the least use base encoding.

Oh yeah, there is spell check (and I’m always Calvin or Kelvin )

Some cool stuff that I regularly use

Encoding, this one is hard to miss – there is a menu for it where you can change/encode to ANSI, UTF-8, UTF with markup, and lot more.

Indent

Tab away; you can select multiple lines and indent them, to reduce the indent – Shift + Tab

Editing

There is a ton of stuff hidden in that edit menu, the ones that I use most

Case Conversion

EOL Conversion

When I’m working on a windows machine writing a shell script (Don’t ask why ), this one is my savior

Remove Trailing space

What would I do without this, especially when you set variables, and you got spaces, oh boy you are in trouble.

I used to use Tab to Space, when I code in NPP and move that to Calc Manager (in earlier versions, now I code directly in Calc Mgr ). I don’t usually trim leading spaces because of the indent – hey there is an easy way to do that too, just saying

Sorting and removing empty lines

I’ve used remove empty lines a lot, sorting not that much.

Column selection and keep unique

Yup, you can make column selection by pressing “Alt” while selecting, TextFX is a plugin with tons of options for editing text and keep unique is my favorite.

Navigate to TextFX->TextFX Tools and check “Sort output unique”

Once done perform a sort, let’s look at a video.

Plugins

These are the plugins that I use, some of them are the default ones and the other you need to install.

JSTool

I’ve written briefly about JSTool when I published the blog post about exportdataslices.

You can use this to format a JSON string, view the string in a tree view. 

Compare

Well, it is used for comparing two files.

You can even perform a compare against the same file before last save. That is an excellent option if you are not clear what you were editing before saving. It has saved me a lot of hair and lot of undo operations. You can use the navigation bar for quick navigation, just saying.

DSpellCheck

Even in NPP, I like to spell check 😉 and this is what the above plugin does, you can turn it on (that is the default)

MIMETools

You saw base encoding and decoding earlier, and yes that comes from MIMETools. You can use this to perform URL encoding (yes you don’t have to look them up on internet again)

XML Tools and Treeview

I talked about XML tools when I wrote about LCM and pretty printing LCM. Once enabled it will automatically validate your XML file. In the earlier post I used the XSL Transformation feature to pretty print LCM.

Take a look at the listing.xml file from an LCM backup.

Two lines!!! Let’s do the magic.

XML Tools -> Pretty print with line breaks

Now that’s a readable XML.

If you want to see a tree view of the XML, you can use the XML Treeview plugin.

Execute from Notepad++

I’ve talked about this feature/plugin when I wrote about launching MaxL’s from Notepad++. You can pretty much launch any program from here.

Here is me launching Groovy code from NPP.

SQL on CSV files

Here is a neat one where you can run SQL on delimited files.

Here is the result!!!

SnippetPlus

I’ve talked about this one when I wrote the post on EAS Console in Notepad ++.

I hope I can update this one with the latest commands. You can dock Snippet Plus and use the available commands.

Sometimes these come handy. Hope it helps.